


Routine Mission

by maranya14



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 21:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/614385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maranya14/pseuds/maranya14
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day in the life of Colonel Dave Dixon, who leads SG-13 on a routine exploratory mission to a new planet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Routine Mission

Dave Dixon did not think of himself as a particularly fanciful or imaginative man. He was a sane and practical person, and twenty plus years of service in the USAF and Special Operations Command had honed his no-fuss, 'get the job done' attitude to an extreme. Somehow, though, in the last three years as the leader of SG-13, his definition of normal work day had been warped so far as to no longer be recognisable by most sane and practical standards. Before his posting to the SGC, nothing in his prior experience would have led him to picture himself in a situation even remotely like the current one. Namely, on a planet fifteen thousand light years from Earth, in the company of two chatty airmen and one hyperactive paleontologist/xenobiologist, hiding out in a cave to avoid the attention of a flock of overgrown...

"I picked 'weird birds' for the pool two missions back," Wells said, regretfully. "So close!" 

"Those are not birds out there, Staff Sergeant: what they are is goddamn dinosaurs with wings!" Dixon corrected, unwrapping another stick of Wrigley's Doublemint. 

"Definitely a form of pterosaur," confirmed Takamoto, with a delighted grin, looking up from his notebook. He held up the page to display the sketch he was working on, showing a large winged creature with a crested head, long beak open to reveal a row of sharp teeth. "And now we have proof that their wings are adapted for active flight, not just gliding!" 

"You sure got an up-close and personal look at that one," Dixon commented. "Shame you lost the camera when it grabbed you." 

"Good thing it dropped you before you got too far off the ground, though. Any higher, and you'd have broken more than just the camera," said Wells. 

"Hey, you think this'll make it to the top ten strangest alien animal encounters, back at the SGC?" asked Murdock. 

"Dunno. I've seen stranger," Dixon said, with an offhand gesture. It was true. Somehow, added to the fact that an unsettling amount of his off-world time revolved around baby-sitting a procession of people obsessed with rocks and stones (archaeologists: old stone ruins; paleontologists: stones, with fossils in them; geologists: rocks, stones and pebbles, even; philologists: really dirty old stones with writings on them;), his life had turned into the freaking Discovery Channel. SG-13 was responsible for four of the entries on that particular top ten list. 

"I wish I'd been with you guys that time you met the Sphinx," Takamoto said, with what Dixon privately considered an idiotic amount of enthusiasm. He had to give the man credit, though, for being unfazed by his recent near-death-or-at-least-horrific-maiming experience. A lot of the scientists he'd dealt with weren't nearly as resilient. Plus, he may have dropped the camera, but he hadn't dropped his gun, which scored him points in the Colonel's book. Maybe he wouldn't be too hard to keep alive. 

"It was just a Goa'uld robot," Wells said, responding to the Sphinx comment. He had the blasé air which came with more than two hundred off-world missions under his belt. "We haven't met any true mythical beasts yet." 

"I hear SG-1 once fought an actual dragon," Murdock said. 

"Hologram," the Colonel said dismissively. "Doesn't count." 

"I still think that SG-3's last entry doesn't belong on the top ten," said Takamoto, distracted by one of his pet grievances. "Even the guys at Area-51 agreed that they were just hamsters! Radioactively-mutated hamsters, but still!" 

"I wonder what sort of superpowers you'd get if you were bitten by a radioactive hamster?" mused Murdock, who was, despite his newbie status, already notorious throughout Stargate Command. (His loud and publicly conducted "DC versus Marvel" civil war with Walter Harriman had entered the annals of SGC legend. Murdock claimed unconvincingly that his sharing a last name with Daredevil's alter ego had nothing to do with which side of the divide he came down on.) 

"You'd be able to run awesomely fast in a wheel?" suggested Wells, with a grin. 

"You'd become freakishly annoying," said Dixon morosely. "Horrible little buggers. Sleep all day, make annoying noises all night, bite the hand that feeds them, poop twice their body weight - I'm the one who has to clean the damn cage. I'd drown 'em in a heartbeat, but then my kids would hate me forever." 

"Er, sir? You don't think those pterosaur things are nocturnal, do you?" Murdock said, casting a nervous glance out beyond the cave entrance. 

"Probably not," Takamoto said cheerfully. "Not that species, anyway. Logically, there must be others out there that are adapted to hunting by night. Hmm. I wonder if..." 

"With our luck, we'll run into some of those, too," the Colonel said, with a cynical smirk. "It's going to be an interesting trip back to the Stargate."

A few hours later, SG-13 strolled through the Stargate back into the Gate Room. Takamoto was clutching his notebook with an air of barely suppressed excitement, while Murdock was trying to carry on an argument with the patently disinterested Wells about the relative merits of radioactively-triggered mutation versus genetic mutation. 

"Anything of note, Colonel?" enquired General Landry, who had stopped by for a short debrief. 

"Routine mission, sir," he replied. "Doc Takamoto has a report about flying dinosaurs that should interest the zoology guys, but nothing out of the ordinary." 

Yeah, he reflected. Weird rocks, killer alien robots, and flying dinosaurs. Dave Dixon, this is your life now.


End file.
